I get asked those questions all the time! lol. When I showed my friends at school my typewritten paper, their like "What font is that?". Im like "Its a typewriter". They are like "Oh you mean that typewriter font called special elite on google docs?" Im like "No, I used a typewriter". They are like "Oh so you must mean microsoft word!" Im like "no. I used an actual typewriter" they were like "Theres the delete key so you can delete letters right?" -_-

Various reasons for taking up typing again (I too used TWs in my youth since there was hardly any other way back then) and the basic one is that when an older technology is replaced by a newer, something is always going to be lost.  The thing that is lost may not always be significant - but often it is, and so many people never even consider that they have sacrificed something along the way.  I always want to know what I am giving away when technology changes, so I investigate - so I have quite a lot of old stuff lying around.

I like the silence too - rather the lack of any pressure at all; word-processors always seem to be goading me to complete more quickly than may be good for the work.  Typewriters just wait, without complaint and without runnning down my batteries!

Then there are the skills.  Analogy follows:
I work in film design, designing and drawing settings.  Many people use computers for some of this work, though not as many as people outside the industry imagine - pencil and tracing paper still rule! The computer people at the top of their trade can all work competently by hand too.  Those who cannot never make the top rank.  I guess it's somehow the same with writing, or seems to be so.

Last edited by beak (24-6-2015 00:54:08)

Beak, what you say is really interesting. It's so true.

The immediate reason I'm now a typewriter fanatic is because, one day a year or so ago, when I was laid up with tendonitis in my foot and feeling fretful, I suddenly had a thought: 'I need to get a typewriter'. I have no idea where it came from. But I reached for the laptop (never far away) and as soon as I looked on eBay, I thought, with equal clarity: 'I need to get ALL the typewriters!' Uh oh.  And about half a minute later I thought: 'Oh ****, I am going to have to learn how to type'. For years, a writer who fakes it - using Microsoft's auto-correction feature, going fast as anything till that moment when I have to go back and correct all the mistakes it missed... no, I suddenly realised I was without the one fundamental physical skill for interacting with the tool/s of my trade. We are the most fantastically unskilled generation in the history of humankind. And the ensuing year has been a profound process, involving learning about (and acquiring too many of) the macahines themselves, and learning how to fix and look after them, and learning how to type. Like going back and joining the bottom of the class.

I'm slowly learning to change the way I work and even the way I write. I'm realising that I've internalised the non-linear methodology of the digital world, and even getting a draft out when you can't edit as you go feels scary. What do you do about the first line!? But it's got me keeping a journal again, which rafts of notebooks and nice new pens had failed to achieve, and the journals are increasingly about ideas for work projects. I'm valuing the ime I spend... 

And of course I'm trying to write about the typewriters. 

I still love my laptop and rely on it, and the internet, for a living - and I love my tablet and phone and Dropbox and blog and Facebook and all the rest. The typewriters, though - they're personal. They're like a kid of weird secret that you can tell everybody.

I really believe that although the technology is great, we HAVE to learn how to switch off. We need toremember how to occupy our own space, with no one looking, with no one telling us what to think. Also, to make things. If I think about it, my heroes are all the people who embody that philosophy so why would I not be all about the typewriters? (David Hockney for example has campaigned for years against the absence of drawing instruction in art colleges. Can you imagine. And he wrote a big book about the techniques used by the Old Masters. Knowledge can be lost.) My boyfriend has a 70s sound system and shoots on film (he is a photographer, & recently did a shoot where he used both digital and film; the client chose the film shots).

I've told the story about his kid, who took one look at his dad messing around on a broken Hermes Baby, and said: 'Say, how does one learn to operate one of these devices?' I showed him the Quiet Riter in the next room, and he took one look at THAT and said: 'I'm going to write a story'.

He grew up with notebooks and computers galore, his dad writes, his mum is a publisher, and I write - but it took a typewriter. It is what it is and it lets you just BE. It's less pressure even than a notebook, I feel. Anyway, he now writes all the time, is serious about it (though not, apparently, about line breaks, margins or spelling), and has an Imperial Good Companion at his mum's. And when they move house in a couple of weeks, we're giving him a Quiet Riter of his own for there, too.

We also love how beautiful they are. Affordable icons of the golden age of industrial design!

[Editing in to fix a typo and say, okay, that was 665 words I now need to go replicate somewhere useful. Didnt mean to write such an essay...]

Last edited by KatLondon (24-6-2015 08:23:44)

I apologize for my historical error; my ethnocentric school system has taught me that it was the US that invented what we think today as the telegraph. I will make sure to double check everything they say as to not make another careless mistake like that again.

And how dare you say that my generation is all too willing to rely on other things and it has had damage done to it, when you are forgetting that we are not the only generation who has been complained about and said to be the worst one yet. Do you not remember how Generation X was put down as being cynical, apathetic, rebelious, and grew up too fast by the Baby Boomers? And even the Baby Boomers were considered rebelious by WWII veterans back in the 50's and 60's. Now you are an adult who is doing well and has grown up. So before you put down a generation, remember that your generation was put down as being the worst back in the 1980's. Have a bit more empathy when saying a whole generaton is bad when it won't be the end-all one. 

As for the subject concerning the obsolesence of the typewriters, the typewriter is by no doubt a useful tool, but so are stone tools. And think about the many other tools we used years ago that are still useful today. What about VHS? Rotary phones? LP records? Incandescent light bulbs? Floppy disk drives? These are all things that can, and do, still serve their purpose, but are now considered obsolete.

However, I can see your point for the typewriter as a better writing tool in general. It's just like a vinyl record: they're superior in sound quality, but have been made obsolete by CD's and CD's have been made obsolete (already) by MP3 players which have been made obsolete (already) by cell phones with the capabilities of downloading music. There are many things that have since replaced the simple vinyl record, but yet it still continues to live on because of its overall sound quality. By all means it's a pain to keep, you have to make sure it's free of dust, doesn't warp from heat, and not to scratch the surface. Not to mention they take up lots of space if you have a large collection. But it's because of the better quality of its main purpose, it lives on. The same could be applied to a typewriter. It produces better writing, but are generally considered a pain to use because of its downsides and accommodations. 

Well said, malole!

My Macbook Pro is on the way out. Bits are beginning not to work. The 'P' key, for one, has packed up - it doesn't do a thing. To write a word with a p in it I have to paste one in, and if I suddenly need to start a sentence with a P or refer to a guy called Peter, I need to go hunting for a capital P - and in the case of some programmes (eg Gmail) it has to be in the right font, or else it'll throw everything out after it. Considering that the main thing I write about, ie in profiles and book reviews, is 'poetry' and 'poets', you can imagine how very irksome this is. (I'm not on that computer now, I'm on the big iMac I inherited from my aunt, which is also slowly expiring, but in different ways...)

Meanwhile, every single typewriter I own types 'p' absolutely fine! You don't even need to think about it! This feels very advanced and efficient...